WI Should Have Accepted Federal Healthcare Money

It's unfortunate to read that Governor Walker turned down $37 million in federal money to help create healthcare exchanges. I'm unclear whether this means we don't have to implement the exchanges as fast or if this is pure politics.

Governor Walker says he wants to wait until the US Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law. This seems like a bogus argument because they won't rule he exchanges illegal and the very argument that it's unconstitutional is flawed. I say it is flawed because before any of the reforms went into effect, paying customers subsidized those who couldn't pay and did not have insurance that would pay. The law says people need to buy insurance, pushing those costs from other paying customers to the people actually using the healthcare services. The only reason I can see it being unconstitutional, in my non-attorney opinion, is because the federal government is involved in it. That's a mere technicality since the condition existed prior to the health reform law.

I opposed the healthcare law in the form it passed. It would be a good idea to change it. It has done some good, but it risks creating problems when the rest of it is implemented.

Wisconsin rejecting the federal money, though, is foolish. We should try to make it work and try to pressure Washington to give us more autonomy and let us have a more privatized system. Governor Walker's rejection of the money is wrong and alienates pragmatists and moderates.

Madison Real Estate Assessments Decreased 3% last year

The headline story in the Wisconsin State Journal today is an article saying real estate prices in Madison declined 3% last year. It’s good that they’re reporting this in a city where the some bubble-clouded thinking persists. There are few points, though, where the article is could have investigated deeper.

1. The article attributes the decline to the recession. It does not address whether the national bubble could be playing a role.
2. The article accepts property assessment values as accurate (at revealing price fluctuations of neighborhoods) without giving any justification.
3. The headline says this is the first decline in 35 years, but it does not look at inflation-adjusted numbers. I suspect that adjusted for inflation there was at was other decrease in the past 35 years.
4. The article accepts the assumption that it’s good for houses to be expensive.

My impression is that the bubble is still present in Madison and just starting to deflate. Most residential properties on the market are priced such that they would not cash flow at today’s interest rates unless they were purchased with a down payment significantly greater than 20%, which to me is the hallmark of an RE bubble.

Assessed prices appear to lag actual prices, so I suspect the decline we have had so far is well over 3%.

If mortgage interest rates rise significantly, it will push prices lower. Since rates are expected to rise, I’m surprised this risk isn’t priced into the market.

All of this means Madison will be experiencing price declines similar to what Minneapolis experienced in a few years ago.

Daycare Subsidy Issues Runs Into Larger Societal Questions

My least favorite leftwing advocacy group sent me an e-mail about why it’s so important that the government fund childcare and preschool.

My husband and I have to work opposite shifts because child care is unaffordable. He works from 6am to 2:30pm, and I have to meet my husband at his job to drop off our son so that I can be to work by 3:00pm. I miss out on putting my son to bed.

It goes on to say they support subsidize that would allow both parents to work at the same time and the kid to spend all day in daycare.

This two-sentence anecdote really got my attention because childcare is something my family struggles with. We have no struggles in paying for it, fortunately, but we struggle with how much childcare we want to use and how to structure it. I leave for work at 7:30am. Early in the afternoon, our babysitter arrives and my wife goes to work. I arrive home before 7pm and relieve the babysitter. I put our baby to bed around 8pm. My wife gets home at various times, usually a little after 8pm.

We are fortunate to be able to afford any amount of daycare we want, but we specifically structured this so we would both get a good amount of time with our baby. I do not claim this is the best way to do it. It’s a system that works for our family at this time.

The e-mail calling for spending tax dollars to help move a kid who spends all day with his parents to a system where he spends most of the day away from them really catches my eye. The e-mail supposes that if this family had just a more money, they would use it to see their kids only briefly in the morning and briefly before bed. There may be many advantages to doing it this way, but we should think it through carefully before we subsidize it.

We also need to look at who is getting the subsidy. If one member of this family earns a solid living wage but their lifestyle requires two incomes and subsidized daycare, in my mind we’re subsidizing the fancy lifestyle as much as the daycare b/c the family could simply give up the lifestyle and pay for daycare themselves.

The funny thing is I support the key initiatives this e-mail is calling for: childcare funding for the poor, increased funding for preschool for the poor, and nutrition programs. In their call for more subsidies for the poor, though, they run into these hard questions about who should take care of our children. I imagine that most societies throughout human history have had a cultural model dictating who is responsible for taking care of the children. The US culture isn’t about dictating anything, so it’s up to the individual to work it out. Individuals need to take note and start working it out for themselves early. Otherwise you end up like the people quoted above who had kids, wanted someone else to take care of them, and didn’t realize they didn’t earn enough money to pay someone to care for their kids.

Crosstalk Due to Ground Plane Interruptions

The Mar 2010 issue of Printed Circuit Design Magazine has a nice article called Accurate Impedance Control. This is one my mind because I’m currently dealing with a board that has crosstalk due to interruptions in the ground plane. I love the succinct way it the diagram in the article illustrates the problem.

Just Shop It!

An excerpt from another message from my favorite organization for sending e-mails supporting policies I disagree with:

We're outraged that in the last year health insurance companies earned 56% more in profits and covered 2.7 million fewer people. And, healthcare insurance rate hikes of up to 39 percent are now happening across the country!

Why don't they stop being outraged for a moment and shop their policies? If their current vendor is such a rip-off, it sounds like a great opportunity for another insurance vendor to get its foot in the door. I cannot understand the mindset of just sitting and stewing about what your vendors are doing. It seems simple just to shop the quote to keep them honest and spend most of your effort finding ways to create value for your customers or employers.

I say this because I don't think the outrage is going to do anything. Even if the outrage make politicians carry out some very specific policy, it's not going to make people provide a service for free. Even if the government makes health insurance as we know it illegal, so the risk is sensibly spread among the entire population instead of being spread among those who bought insurance prior to be coming sick, we will still be paying the same amount overall for the same services.

What's "Good" for the Real Estate Market?

My broker’s newsletter today had an article called From Rescue to Recovery on the US housing market. USAA follows the same assumptions that all financial articles on real estate accept: Good = people moving house often and spending a lot of their money on housing. I suppose that is true from the real estate industry point of view, just as it’s may be good for refineries if people burn gasoline often and spend a lot of their money on gasoline. But we never hear this view in a financial article.

I believe in capitalism. I want people to create value that makes people spend their money on goods and services. If people aren’t buying your product, it feels bad for the person marketing the product, but it’s really just feedback from the market. Sometimes people don't want what you're selling.

Writers of articles on real estate should stop and ask themselves what are the virtues of people moving a lot and paying a lot for space.

It’s true that if a lot of good economic activity is going on in an area, it will make space there more expensive. But the cost of space is not a perfect barometer of the desirability of a particular area because we are coming out of a huge real estate bubble. It’s possible in the next few decades people will choose to spend more of their money on vacations instead of residential space. That doesn’t mean things are bad. It’s just changing preferences over time.

Crosstalk on a Reset Line Strikes Again

I have been working on an XScale board that has been giving me trouble for the month. Every time the software attempted to configure something on the mPCI slot, the system hung. Even though the problem only appeared after a spin of the board with the XScale processor, the software vendor (Team F1) worked assiduously on the problem refusing to blame the hardware.

It turns out the problem was a 1.3V core reset line going to the XScale processor was picking up crosstalk from the PCI bus because of a layout issue. The white line is the victim trace, which runs parallel to PCI lines. I do not have access to all artwork layers, but I think these traces run over a break in a split power plane.

The board designer didn’t think of a reset line as a critical trace because it doesn’t transition frequently. That keeps it from being an aggressor trace, but it’s very easy for a core reset line to be a victim of crosstalk. To be deasserted, this reset line must be greater than 1.0V. It doesn’t take much noise to pull it down into its indeterminate range (<1.0v) . I would have probably done the exact same thing because it's an easy mistake to make.

When I probed the line near the reset input, the 12pF capacitance of my scope probe was enough to prevent the problem. Tacking a 10pF cap to via going to that ball of the BGA made the problem go away altogether! Higher values worked just the same. At least this problem was easy to solve.

This is the second time in the past 14 months I’ve encountered a reset line being asserted due to noise or crosstalk. Reset lines must be treated as critical traces, especially if they’re low voltage and especially if their driven high only by weak pullup resistors.